BlogY - A lightweight express blogging engine in NodeJS + Handlebars + Markdown

Build Status npm version david.dm

NPM

This is BlogY (pronounced, blogee), a lightweight blogging engine built upon ExpressJS, Handlebars and Markdown. The aim being to design a very simple engine, with minimal setup. It is as simple as 1.2.3.. :)

About

BlogY has been inspired from both Ghost and Jekyll. I love Ghost platform, for its simplicity and ability to change configs. And Jekyll, on how easy it is generate a website and create posts/pages. You can say, its a crossover between both blogging platforms. Rather than providing a backend for it, you can change the config file and it will do the job for you (as long as, its under your control).

Install

npm install -g blogy

You might want to install it globally to get access to the CLI api, for creating and deleting posts/pages.

Setup

To setup,

blogy new <name of your blog>

This will setup a base project with defaults. After the install is successful, cd into the directory and try running:

node index.js

This will startup a server on localhost:3000. If you don't have any posts, the list will be empty.

There are 3 main folders, while setting up your shiny blogY engine.

  1. config
  2. templates
  3. data

Config folder is where your platform configuration resides. If you look at the index.js inside the folder, you can see all the default configurations. You can go ahead and change things, as per your requirements. They are pretty self-explainatory :). Some of the configurations that you can set are:

  1. Blog Title
  2. URL structure for posts
  3. Timestamp display
  4. Author information, such as avatar/name
  5. Template information.

As you can see, 99% of the config goes via this file; which gives you guys full authority to change things and see the results. But please make sure, "With great powers, comes great responsibility". For ex: if you change the url structure for the posts, there will be cases that blogY can't find your posts, unless the file names are updated. But dont worry, we will add a task for this in the future.

Templates folder consists of templates, separated in folders. For instance with default setup, you will see a default template folder inside the directory. I am using PureCSS layout in it. As always, its your decision on choosing which folder and where. But it is always good to follow the same pattern when creating new templates. For instance, a template consists of:

  1. Public Folder: Which hosts all your static assets
  2. layout.hbs: Your master template/layout
  3. page.hbs: Page template
  4. post.hbs: Post template
  5. home.hbs: The main, with list of posts.
  6. 404.hbs: The usual deal :).

And yes, we use handlebars as our templating engine, because its awesome!

Next up, data folder. As the name suggests, this guy will store all your posts/pages when created. There is a separate folder for posts and pages, so that its easy to organize. And yes, you can markdown for your posts/pages which makes it even better! Again, this is a structure I follow so that things are organized and well kept.

Oh yea! CLI!

BlogY also provides, out of the box CLI api for you to create or delete post/page. Again, its easy peasy, lemon squeasy!. Lets list down:

Navigate to the folder, where you have setup blogY.

Create Post

blogy create post --t=<Title goes here>

Create Page

blogy create page --t=<Title goes here>

Delete Post/Page

The easiest thing to do is, navigate to directory and delete the said post. Or try

blogy delete post --f=<Name of the file>

For pages, replace post with page. Easy as that!

Issues

Please report issues here: https://github.com/jeremyrajan/blogy/issues

Contributions

If you have any new feature request, please setup a tracker for it or if you want to work on blogY with me, I will be more than happy :). Ping me at jeremyrajan[at]gmail[dot]com